Inside the Star

Trees downed by ice storm find new life in furniture, lumber and mulch

The massive post ice-storm cleanup effort has nearly cleared the streets of branches and limbs felled by the weather. The mulcher awaits most of the debris, but one craftsman has found a use for an uprooted tree.

Dressler, who runs the custom furniture company Brothers Dressler with his brother, Jason, happened upon a 680-kilogram tree toppled near his Sterling Rd. workshop just a day after the storm pulled down trees across the GTA, cutting power to more than 300,000 customers.

“We drove by and noticed that this tree had been pulled out, roots and all, from the ground. We were lucky to get our hands on that,” he said. “To me it was about potential and what can be done with it.”

Dressler said the piece will take about a year before it’s dry enough to work with, but thinks it might eventually become a bench.

“We’ve experimented with benches that have a root base and then go into a bench. For us really it’s about using responsibly sourced material. What we look at is as local as possible,” he said. Dressler couldn’t identify the species precisely because it didn’t have any leaves, but said it looked like either an ash tree or a maple.

Dressler’s shop was part of a design exhibition honouring the tree that was thought to inspire Alexander Muir’s “The Maple Leaf Forever.” Their piece was a hanging light with interwoven branches of the maple as a shade.

Trees picked up by the city are destined for a decidedly less ceremonial end.

City crews have been cleaning up a massive volume of roadside debris, with between 400 and 500 truckloads of chipped-up twigs, branches and brambles being carted away daily. As part of the deal with the city, private contractors who are mulching the wood will get to keep the resulting product in exchange for a discount on their services.

Sean Gorham, owner of Urban Tree Salvage, says private arborists have been struggling to off-load full trees that could not be saved from the damage. Landfills can charge $90 per tonne and up, he said.

“We just recently opened our doors to private arborists because of the devastation the ice storm has caused,” he said. “Everybody has a huge problem with wood waste.”

But for Gorham, who has the proper equipment to process the logs, it’s far from waste. So far he has received about four truckloads of trunks which his company has sawed into about 4,000 board-feet of serviceable lumber.

“We’ve got over 1,600 parks that we’re responsible for cleaning up as well,” said Jim Harnum, manager of solid waste services. “Last week we started getting that engine rolling and getting the crews in (the parks). We’re using grappling-type equipment to get into the creeks and pull stuff from the creeks.”

The cleanup began in earnest Jan. 3 and was expected to take eight weeks. Harnum said the city is on schedule and on budget.

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